September 26, 2007

It's time for me to start brushing back up on my game development skills.

Starting in November, I'm going to be working on games again. Not full-time, and not first-person shooters, but I will be working on some "serious games" here at work.

It's kind of an interesting experiment. I'm still learning the meetings industry, so creating games to teach how to be a better meeting facilitator or how to handle large expo events more cost-effectively will be an interesting challenge.

The fun part is going to be trying to find out what choices people have to make to handle these sorts of situations and extract out the "interesting" part of it. I've done some serious games in the past under contract from Utah State University, but the design was completely done for those before I got them, so all I got to do was the implementation work. For these, I'll be handling all design and most of the coding, so it will be an excellent stepping stone back towards what I feel is "normal."

CLAIRE: Okay, we have a choice. We can live, or we can go on a roadtrip to Vegas.EVERYONE: Woohoo! Roadtrip! Take it off!

(Everyone arrives in Vegas. Zombies pop out of a freight container, all wearing the exact same outfit.)

PAUL W.S. ANDERSON: See, we wanted to replicate the experience of playing a video game with limited texture memory here, so...AUDIENCE: Shh...we want to see Alice kick ass!

(Alice kicks ass.)

BAD GUY: She's kicking too much ass. Hit the PAUSE button.

(Henchman picks up his DUALSHOCK(tm) 2 controller and hits PAUSE. Alice stands still. Another third of the cast dies.)

HENCHMAN: Oh, shit, she's going Psycho Mantis on our ass!

(Alice unpauses herself and kills all of the bad guy's henchmen.)

BAD GUY: Run away!

(Bad guy gets bitten by one of his borrowed extras from "28 Weeks Later" and gets flown off to the Vegas hive.)

ALICE: Okay, now that enough people are dead, let's go get a helicopter to fly everyone else away.

(Alice goes and gets a helicopter for everyone else, then goes down into the Vegas hive.)

ALICE: Funny, it looks like I'm playing "Doom 3" on the Xbox...guess I don't need to worry about vertical aiming.RED QUEEN #2: Not so fast, Alice.ALICE: Hey, holobitch, whazzup?RED QUEEN #2: Dr. Isaac...ALICE: Who?RED QUEEN #2: I think you call him "bad guy."ALICE: Ah, okay. Go on.RED QUEEN #2: "Bad guy" has turned into a bad extra from Japanese tentacle porn.ALICE: Great...maybe now we can earn this "R."

(Very anticlimactic battle occurs.)

ALICE: Cool. Now let's show hundreds of clones of me so we can set up for "Resident Evil 4."

September 22, 2007

If you are using Windows Vista and you are working with an older CD that due to the passage of time has CRC errors on some files, expect Explorer to crash a few times while using it. Basically, the thumbnailer seems to crash if it can't read a file because the file is actually unreadable, but is able to handle security issues and corrupt files just fine.

As a workaround, browse your CD in Details View, or XCOPY the CD to your local machine with the /C switch so that you can figure out which file has gone bad.

I've not forgotten about this blog. I've got a big rant brewing about QA and objectivisim, as well as another fairly hefty rant involving why my current exile may be the best thing possible for my career in QA.

September 10, 2007

I went back to work on Thursday, but I just couldn't make it on Friday. I nearly passed out halfway to the train station, so I went home and went back to sleep.

I managed to kick back over the weekend for the most part and did a lot of low-impact "make busy" tasks like adding two dozen games to VistaGameDoctor.com. Almost eighty games listed now, could be higher this week.

I'm at work now, but the torrential downpour here has been insane. Nothing quite like seeing water gushing up out of street vents, massive slabs of street sinking into the ground, and eleven-foot-high wakes being left by vehicles to make you want to go back home and crawl into bed again.

September 6, 2007

Fortunately, I'm not having to debug the SQL Query from Hell™ today, but it's still difficult to concentrate.

I nearly didn't make it to work. I missed my connection between my train and my bus this morning, and while I was standing waiting for the next bus, I started to get really light-headed and nearly fainted. After sitting down for ten minutes, I was okay, but I almost passed out again while waiting for people to get off the bus so that I could get on.

Fortunately, the people who were waiting for the bus with me saw that I was in a wee bit of distress and let me on first. I napped for 40 minutes and awoke just in time to get into the office.

I intend to vegitate this weekend if at all possible to try to recover a little more strength.

September 5, 2007

I'll be leaving here in two hours to go get the stints in my nose removed from my septoplasty last Thursday.

I'm gradually returning to normal, and hopefully once the stints are gone, I'll be up to 90% fairly quickly.

I'll be making a fairly large post about the entire experience of the last week later this weekend, but just one quick tip. If you are ever going to have major surgery, don't read anything from Ayn Rand prior to surgery. Objectivism and pain don't mix very well on a subconscious level.

About Me

Currently Sr. Software Engineer in Test at Netflix. Formerly Sr. Quality Engineer on Firefly at Amazon, QA Manager at Ritual Entertainment, Software Test Lead at Microsoft Game Studios, Director of IT for Meeting Professionals International.

Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent those of any current, former, or future employer.